Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates
There are technical terms for this kind of disintegration. Austal USA, Independence’s Alabama-based builder, calls it “galvanic corrosion.” Civilian scientists know it as “electrolysis.” It’s what occurs when “two dissimilar metals, after being in electrical contact with one another, corrode at different rates,” Austal explained in a statement.
A reason you aren’t supposed to mix aluminum and copper wiring in your abode.
North American detail map of Flickr and Twitter locations
Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both
The best intro book for any topic
Of course I checked out physics and in addition to Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon Guide to Physics, it gave a bunch of books on various topics within physics. I have read none of these books, so I have no basis for endorsing or disputing the choices; I don’t know if “Best Intro” means they were going for pop-sci books for a general audience or intro textbooks for the student or serious amateur. The Cartoon Guide might indicate one way — I’m not sure — but the other titles are or seem more like textbooks. The closest I can come to a recommendation is noting that the QM book is by David J Griffiths, I’ve heard good things about it, and his Electrodynamics textbook is very good.
Could a Tyrannosaurus Rex bite through a modern day tank?
Per Glasstone and Sesonske’s Nuclear Reactor Engineering, “Alpha phase uranium is “soft and ductile, Beta phase is hard and brittle and Gamma phase is very soft”. Therefore I don’t believe the depleted uranium would help with a T-Rex on the battlefield.
via @rands
Here then is the beta version of my strip about evolution. This is a chapter of the book Science Stories which will be out from Myriad Editions next spring. I’m sure there’ll be mistakes here, so do feel free to point them out, so that I can make the necessary changes. Thank you.
Portland Reservoir Gets Drained After Man Urinates In It
Plenty of pee-pee jokes, too, in case you’re going through withdrawal after that Weiner^2 thing.
The coverage covers the right scientific issues.
“It’s inappropriate behavior. But how many animals are doing that or birds?” he said. “I don’t want to second-guess the city, but I can’t think of anything chemically that would have me be concerned.”
Dr. Gary Oxman, the Multnomah County health officer who advises the city on infectious disease issues, also explained to the The Oregonian that the typical bladder holds a mere 6-8 ounces of water, which should quickly dilute in the reservoir and pose negligible health risks. That news should relieve Portland residents.
A city official claimed that science doesn’t matter
Shaff said the Water Bureau regularly finds dead animals in the same drinking supply but doesn’t dump the water. “This is different,” he said.
“Do you want to drink pee?” he asked bluntly.
When questioned about scientific data and the small amount of urine in such a large reservoir, he interjected: “Answer the question. It has nothing to do with scientifically.
“Most people,” he added, “are gonna be pretty damn squeamish about that.”
But you are already drinking pee. Much of the water in the reservoir was inside of an animal at one time or another. Tell the people that it gets treated, for crying out loud!
h/t to PhDwannabe
More of my fascination with dragonflies, captured in slow-motion. Got some to hover for me at Burke Lake Park. (Also nabbed a whole bunch of geocaches. It was a good day)
The lower resolution at 420 fps is a little frustrating, as is how it’s further degraded by youtube compression. 210 fps didn’t turn out too badly:
Heat transfer and global warming tutorial.
New Research Result: Bubble Forms Not So Anonymous
How you fill in the bubble has a personal touch.
If bubble marking patterns were completely random, a classifier could do no better than randomly guessing a test set’s creator, with an expected accuracy of 1/92 ≈ 1%. Our classifier achieves over 51% accuracy. The classifier is rarely far off: the correct answer falls in the classifier’s top three guesses 75% of the time (vs. 3% for random guessing) and its top ten guesses more than 92% of the time (vs. 11% for random guessing).
Could Liquid Nitrogen Help Build Tasty Burgers?
“The freezing followed by the burst of high heat lets you brown the outside without overcooking the inside,” Dr. Myhrvold said. And the deep-frying is supposed to be a technological improvement over the classic White Castle spatula-on-a-griddle technique.
“On a griddle,” he explained, “even when you press a burger with a spatula, you can’t make all of it contact the surface because the edge of the burger is crenellated, with all these nooks and crannies formed by the cylinders of raw meat. But if you put it in hot fat, that fat penetrates and you get a super-thin layer of crispy Maillard browning all the way around those meat fibers.”